Ron Miller's posts

There’s probably nothing much more exciting for a space artist than to have an entirely new world to play with! I’ve been busy ever since the New Horizons flyby creating new landscapes of Pluto based on the data that has been arriving-ever so slowly—-from the distant spacecraft. It seems that every square inch of each…

The history of the modern exploration of the solar system has been a catalog of surprises. No matter what astronomers and planetary scientists expected to find, the moons and planets have managed to say “Gotcha!” more than once. From the discovery that Mercury does not keep one side always facing the sun and that the…

NASA's 2016 budget was approved by President Obama last week, and it contained some exciting goals: "A robust planetary science program includes data analysis of ongoing missions, and development of the next Mars rover. NASA will also continue formulating a mission to Europa, Jupiter's icy moon that, data suggests,…

Science fiction has long been looked to as a source of prophecy...but why? Perhaps because, out of necessity, its futures work: spaceships fly and inventions are successful because they need to be—there'd be no story without them. And because more often than not (to paraphrase Jules Verne) whatever one man can imagine…

In the heyday of America's love affair with space travel, there were few products that weren't tied in somehow to rockets and astronauts. One of these was Inapak, an unfortunately named Ovaltine wannabe.

A report from the Jet Propulsion laboratory today reveals that in May 2012, while Titan's southern hemisphere was experiencing autumn, images from NASA's Cassini orbiter revealed a huge swirling cloud, several hundred miles across, taking shape above Titan's south pole.

Once upon a time it was quite popular to depict the human body in terms of machinery. The idea was that all of the functions and organs of the body could be equated on a one-to-one basis with machinery and technology: the eyes were cameras, the lungs bellows, the arms derricks, etc. The result was scores of books…

In 1951 Collier's magazine devoted an entire issue to reporting an imagined version of World War III. The magazine followed every detail of the conflict from the first attack to the eventual occupation of Russia by the United Nations.

People like to make lists of things, especially lists of superlatives: the best, fastest, oldest, largest, heaviest and so on. There are lists of the ten fastest animals and the ten longest rivers and even of the ten highest-paid rock stars. The Guinness company created a small industry from publishing lists exactly…

In a study published in the latest issue of Science, astronomers led by graduate student Huan Meng, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, announced the discovery of remains of a mammoth planetary collision.

Most histories of that wonderful subgenre of science fiction called "steampunk" list Ronald Clark's 1967 novel,Queen Victoria's Bombas the first. But was this really the first steampunk novel? Here's another possible contender.

The American Civil War was probably the first truly modern war in that technology was so important. The military use of balloons, the development of steam-powered ironclads and monitors (as well as the invention of the gun turret), rifled cannons of unprecedented size, submarines, guncotton and telegraphy were all…

If you are sick of all those safely precautions required to set off fireworks these days, then maybe you'd have been happier 500 years in the past. Those were the days when fireworks were truly awe-inspiring.